"I felt like I was in a movie or a TV show, where you see things that happen and it doesn't feel like it's real," said Kirpach, an art history teacher in Frisco schools. "We've been diving in this area close to shore for years, and it was just an amazing feeling."

It's only the third time a case like this has ever been reported, the last being in 2009. "These were healthy starfish," said Tony Reisinger, Cameron County Extension Agent for Coastal & Marine Resources with Texas Sea Grant at Texas A&M University.

"It's like swimming with a submarine with teeth," Kelly said. "I mean, it's huge, it's unbelievable down there; it dwarfs everything I've ever seen underwater."
According to scientists at Mote, there is at least one other Great White in and around the Gulf and her name is Betsy.

Scientists are now studying the photos of a rare and gruesome goblin shark accidentally caught in the Gulf of Mexico after they spotted another unusual deep-sea creature lying with the captured beast on the deck of the boat.

After a two-hour battle, the anglers finally got the hammerhead to shore where they noticed its injury.
Friends looked on in amazement as Campus started pulling shark pups out intact and rushing them to the water so they could swim away.

The Bald Cypress forest, protected in an oxygen-free environment for more than 50,000 years, was likely uncovered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said Ben Raines, executive director of the nonprofit Weeks Bay Foundation and one of the first divers to explore the site.

The wreck, its identity and origin still unknown, remains in about 4,300 feet of water some 150 to 170 miles off Galveston. "What we have just completed is the deepest documentation, recovery and excavation of a shipwreck in U.S. waters," said James Delgado, one of eight marine archaeologists aboard the Nautilus.

Covadonga Arias, a professor of microbial genomics at Auburn University in Alabama, found that Vibrio vulnificus was 10 times higher in tar balls than in sand and up to 10 times higher than in seawater.

The discovery of three historic shipwrecks, most likely from the same event, is so unusual in the northern Gulf of Mexico that just about any information gained from their analysis will chart new ground, said a researcher on the project.

"I looked around baffled," she said by phone Thursday from Miramar Beach. "Is this really happening? It felt like something straight out of a movie."
Four days after the mysterious find, despite some promising leads, she's still trying to track down the owner.

Members of the now-legendary Gulf shark fishing family that bagged a potentially record-breaking mako last month are back in action with their latest, a 13-foot hammerhead.

Cousins Earnie and Joey Polk and Kenny Peterson from Milton, Florida, shot to fame in April when a photo of their 800-pound mako shark draped over the back of their pickup truck went viral.

The fish was the largest-ever land-based catch of its kind, but the record didn't count because the mako ended up on the grill. It was not released.

Now the group's Facebook page is littered with photos of their new catch, a hammerhead with a girth they say measured over 7 feet and had an estimated weight of more than 1,400 pounds.

"Just caught the fish of a lifetime, fought it for four hours!!" wrote Earnie Polk on his page. Much of the fish's tail was missing, according to the group. If it had been complete, they estimate the shark would have measured over 14 feet.

The current record listed with the International Land-based Shark Fishing Association is for a hammerhead just 12 feet long, weighing 758 pounds and with a 6-foot girth.

Yet, like its mako predecessor, the hammerhead will not make it to the record books, despite the fact that this time the Polks succeeded in their efforts to release the shark.

Earnie Polk said via email that he did not have time to get the proper pictures to submit an entry because he was too focused on tagging and releasing the massive predator.

The crew's tagging activities were featured in a recent article from the Pensacola News Journal, which says the group's catches have been spotted by a TV network. Plans for a reality TV show are reportedly in the works.

The Polks do not release video of their catches now, keeping that under wraps for the future.

A potential Shark Dynasty epic could be as controversial as the popular duck-hunting version, with animal-rights groups fervently against the catching of sometimes rare fish for sport, even if they are ultimately released.

"Unfortunately, catch and release fishing is cruelly disguised as a sport and touted as being humane," PETA spokesperson Ashley Byrne said at the time of the mako catch. "Really, studies show that animals that are caught and returned to the water often die from shock or from their injuries related to being caught."

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shark expert John Carlson says that taggers in the Gulf are very important to them.

"I would call (tagging) essential. The information is always used for helping us determine stock structure and where animals are going," Carlson said, "Also it can tell us how well they survive after being captured."

Although Carlson said it is hard to know exactly how much being caught really affects the fish because many factors contribute to their survival. He said one thing is for sure, the shorter the time on the line, the more likely a shark will live once it is released.

Earnie Polk estimates he tagged and released more than 130 sharks last year.